There’s far more to Den­mark than just Copen­hagen, as TAMLYN JONES hap­pily dis­cov­ers

ASK your av­er­age Brit to name some towns in Den­mark and you’ll prob­a­bly be greeted by a blank stare and shake of the head once they’ve listed the cap­i­tal, Copen­hagen.

But tourists are miss­ing a trick by over­look­ing the port city of Aarhus.

This is no sleepy back­wa­ter with pic­ture post­card views straight out of a Hans Chris­tian An­der­sen novel and lit­tle else to ex­cite and en­gage its vis­i­tors – it’s a thriv­ing city of 275,000 peo­ple with enough his­tory, tourist at­trac­tions and re­tail ther­apy to keep all-com­ers happy, and has ben­e­fited from phe­nom­e­nal in­vest­ment since the turn of the cen­tury.

Aarhus now sits as a vi­brant, mod­ern lo­cale that feels big enough to ex­cite but small enough not to over­whelm.

Mod­ern glass ed­i­fices rub shoul­ders with both his­toric and 20th cen­tury Bru­tal­ist ar­chi­tec­ture. Get­ting lost while wan­der­ing its maze of tight-knit back­streets, brim­ming with in­de­pen­dent bou­tiques and places to eat, is highly rec­om­mended.

At night, these same streets teem with young, hip Danes en­joy­ing beers out­side its plen­ti­ful ros­ter of bars, cock­ing a snook at the bit­ing Novem­ber tem­per­a­tures on my visit as they snug­gle un­der cosy com­pli­men­tary blan­kets.

Den­mark’s sec­ond largest city must be do­ing some­thing right be­cause it was named Euro­pean Cap­i­tal of Cul­ture for 2017.

My trip started with an overnight stay at the ex­cel­lent Point A ho­tel in Shored­itch, cen­tral Lon­don, fol­lowed by a quick walk to Liver­pool Street sta­tion for the ex­press train to Stansted Air­port.

Ryanair op­er­ates a daily ser­vice to the small, but per­fectly formed, Aarhus Air­port which is around 80 min­utes away. Ded­i­cated trans­fer buses wait for pas­sen­gers, so there is no stand­ing around get­ting cold and frus­trated.

After a 60-minute trans­fer to the city cen­tre, we were whisked straight to ‘Rooftop’, a pur­pose-built ter­race which opened in 2017 atop the city’s his­toric Salling depart­ment store.

Here, you can fill your In­sta­gram ac­count to your heart’s con­tent with shots of the won­der­ful rooftops, the city’s pic­turesque Søn­der­gade shop­ping street and even get an adren­a­line rush from the glass-bot­tomed bal­cony, check­ing out the shop­pers 90 feet below.

Æbleskiver, a Dan­ish dessert del­i­cacy akin to a spher­i­cal pan­cake, is served from the Rooftop’s bar with